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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28972956">Home in Your Hands: Eren Yaeger</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarthSuki/pseuds/DarthSuki'>DarthSuki</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>To Love a Titan [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Caring, F/M, Feral Behavior, Hopefulness, M/M, Macro/Micro, Origin Story, Possessive Behavior, Protectiveness, Size Difference, Titan Eren Yeager, Titan Shifters</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 07:54:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,951</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28972956</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarthSuki/pseuds/DarthSuki</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>For as long as Eren can remember, he's been a titan wandering the empty land in an endless string of days without meaning or worth. He sometimes has visions of distant memories, ones that he thinks are his own, but it isn't until he comes upon a drowning human that he realizes how much he wants to <i>live</i>. He knows there's more than just mindless existence, and he wants to find meaning it it again.</p><p>He wants to protect you.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Attack Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin)/Reader, Eren Yeager/Reader</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>To Love a Titan [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123775</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>193</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>EREN JAEGER|AOT</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Home in Your Hands: Eren Yaeger</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>‘Home in Your Hands’ is a canon-divergent AU series where the reader is a survivor of Quinta--one of the districts on Wall Maria that was left abandoned after its fall--and is saved by Eren, who has been in his titan form for so many years that he's almost forgotten how to be human.</p><p>Through their companionship the reader is offered a freedom beyond the walls of Quinta and Eren discovers that he finally has a meaning to his existence: to protect them.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The very first memory that he has is of running. Running away, with fear settled so deep in his mind that he thought it would never leave him for all of eternity and beyond. It’s white-hot and tangled into a fierce web within his mind, grip so tight that each and every step seems suffocating. Though each footfall makes the very earth shake with the weight of his titan body, he feels like nothing more than a terrified rabbit desperately running away from a starved wolf.</p><p>What was he running from? Why?</p><p>He doesn’t know. The fear, tangible as ice flowing thick in his veins, leaves him confused and panicked. The man’s awareness extends only into that singular moment at first, as if he’d just suddenly sparked into existence with instincts to push him forward.</p><p>The titan could only spare a single glance over his shoulder, a brief moment of clarity sparkling through the suffocating smoke of muddling fear.</p><p>Behind him lay a wall many times his height, gargantuan and fortified.</p><p>A wall, but no hunters. Nothing chasing him.</p><p>
  <em>Cloaks colored like emeralds, flapping in the wind. Swords gleaming against the light of the sun, sharp enough to fall through flesh and bone as easy as it sliced the wind. Hoods, but no faces beneath.</em>
</p><p>Nothing chasing him.</p><p>He continued to run, making the earth shake and tremble beneath his feet until there was not a single ounce of energy left in his body, and he found himself beneath the shade of hundreds of trees that made even he feel small. A forest, thick with enough foliage to hide him from plain sight. The sun had fallen below the horizon and darkness was quick to fall like a cold blanket over the land.</p><p>Why did he need to hide?</p><p>The titan took a moment to think. Up until that moment, instinct was the only thing driving him, though he couldn’t even find a reason behind it—no origin to the fear, no moment before that shock of raw existence had force awareness into him.</p><p>And after that, more questions came, one more quickly after the other. Who was he? What was he?</p><p>He… thinks. He can think. He is <em>aware</em>. The titan holds his hands up, looking at his palms in a moment of self-reflection that even he understands is something special, something important to remembering everything <em>before</em> that vital moment the universe gave birth to his senses.</p><p>But he is tired. He wants to sleep. The titan decides only then that he feels safe again, fear having gone numb within his mind, and that he can risk sitting down with his massive back against an equally massive tree—though he has no idea why he understands that it is <em>him</em> who is the massive one and not the world around him as miniscule—and slowly drifts off into something he knows is called sleep.</p>
<hr/><p>Hours fade into days.</p><p>...</p><p>Days into weeks.</p><p>...</p><p>Weeks into months.</p><p>...</p><p>He remembers somewhere along the line that his name is Eren Jaeger. He can’t remember a single moment of worth before that fateful moment that sent him away from the walls, scared for his life in a way so powerful that even recalling it sent a brief shiver down his spine.</p><p>Other titans—ones that don’t seem to hold the same level of awareness nor intelligence that Eren has—don’t pay him very much attention at all. They simply wander like walking, mindless corpses, gaze hollow of everything but the most primal urge to eat.  To hunt.</p><p>At first, Eren thinks that he will eventually become one of them; maybe that’s the cycle of things, his humanity slowly draining away until he was just as mindless as all the others roaming about the countryside. Maybe that’s why he can’t remember anything at all. Though it made sense on some level of logic, there was something—a nagging feeling, really—that assured Eren it wasn’t true. He didn’t know how this felt like some undeterred sense of iron-solid truth, but the origin of that knowledge felt just as murky as everything else he couldn’t remember.</p><p>So he starts to wander like the other titans do, from one area to the next with no real sense of purpose or meaning. Like a ghost, a corpse, a hollow remnant of a person—what else is there to his existence other than to simply exist? Though they offer him no glimpse of acknowledgement, Eren decides that it is preferable to laying down on the cold earth and simply letting his consciousness fade away into nothingness.</p><p>Sometimes, the horde comes upon people. It’s usually a group of them, all on horseback and riding fast along the grand landscape. Eren doesn’t know who they are, but he faintly recognizes the deep green of their cloaks.</p><p>Most of the time, they end up eaten.</p><p>Months of mindless existence leaves him apathetic to their screams—he doesn’t eat them himself, but he doesn’t do more than stand off to the edge of the swarm of mindless monsters, wondering why the sound of their fragile agony leaves him feeling something old, muted, but defined within his chest. A feeling both familiar and intimate; one that he has felt many times before.</p><p>Rage.</p><p>But it’s muted, like a long-forgotten memory, outline warped and hazy beneath churning waves of water, and is largely gone the moment that all the screaming falls silent.</p><p>So he wanders, and wanders,</p><p>and wanders.</p>
<hr/><p>Directions have no real meaning to titans, Eren learns. They tend to just pick a direction and move with accordance to whims, and he has long-since stopped trying to find any reason behind it. One foot in front of the other. One leg pushing against the ground to heave the body forward. That is all existence is anymore.</p><p>But it comes as a sharp change to the blurry days when they arrive at another wall. Eren, having been pulled from his trance, blinks up above himself at the towering expanse of stone. He is almost certain this is not the same wall that he had fled from before—no, he <em>is</em> certain that it isn’t, though there isn’t any evidence beyond forgotten memories as proof. What is this place?</p><p>And why does he know it has a name?</p><p>Quinta.</p><p>The fact that he <em>knows</em> it’s called Quinta surprises the titan so much that he's practically pushed back by the force of it, tripping over his own feet and onto his ass as he can only stare up at the top of the wall and the sky beyond it. Watching the sky, the clouds roam over the wall and slowly out of sight, as his hands grip the soft grass beneath him while his mother faintly calls out for dinner and—</p><p>
  <em>What?</em>
</p><p>Eren returns to himself from the foreign memories with ice in his veins. He slowly moves back onto his feet and glances once more to the top of the wall. The other titans were scrabbling uselessly at it’s surface, some unable to get a grip into the polished stone while others were large enough to gain a foothold where the stone had been cracked by what appeared to be previous titans.</p><p>Did this mean there were humans beyond this wall?</p><p>Eren watched as his mindless brethren worked at their useless task with unwavering, unyielding force.</p><p>He glance out at the landscape they’d traveled from. In the distance he can see storm clouds, dark and dangerous—though, perhaps more to other living creatures than to himself. Eren still didn’t enjoy being rained on, so he turned back towards the walls with a newfound curiosity for what may lie within them. Humans? Perhaps. Somehow, he knew that they wouldn’t be able to do very much to him at all. All he cared about was finding something to sit beneath and hide from the downpour of rain that is sure to cover the area quickly by the time that the sun fell below the horizon.</p><p>It’s a brief distraction from the endless days of wandering, but Eren can’t quite put away the sense that somewhere deep within him that he <em>yearns</em> to climb over the wall for no other reason than to do it. To see what lay beyond.</p><p>He hadn’t felt so curious in a long, long time.</p>
<hr/><p>Eren’s eyes aren’t quite sure what to make of the creature in his hand. It’s soft and cold against his palm, and not even struggling within his grip. He’s not sure why he had reacted so quickly, so sharply—the moment that he realized it was a human that had fallen in the water, his body had simply moved entirely on its own without even a moment to think. Mindless. Instinct. <em>Protect</em>.</p><p>He felt the urge—no, the <em>need</em>, to save them. From where he’d stood between dilapidated houses he sprinted, all but sliding into the flooded pond and reaching his hand into the murky depths to grab the helpless creature from out of the clutches of certain death.</p><p>But for a moment, he wonders if he’s too late.</p><p>The rain falls hard against the expanse of his back, soaking his hair until it sticks against the back of his neck. Raindrops like white noise around him, dulling all the noise save for the sudden wet sputtering of air suddenly from the human in his hand.</p><p>They’re alive.</p><p>Eren is actually surprised in the fact. Though he had been so quick to try and save them, his mind had been almost assured on the fact that he’d pull out a cold corpse from the cold embrace of the water. As if, deep down, he’d already accepted that he was atoning for something he’d done long ago. A mistake he’d made. People he abandoned.</p><p>For some reason, Eren had accepted the fact that he’d be lonely for the rest of his limitless days.</p><p>But the human is <em>alive</em>. Cold, shaking and coughing up water, but alive nonetheless. Eren realizes then that he should stop holding them so tightly, loosening his grip just enough to keep their fragile form from dropping back into the water. Their head moves, slowly at first, but hurrying as awareness seems to sink back into their body.</p><p>And then, turning their face, their eyes meet with his own.</p><p>And in that moment, Eren suddenly realizes an intrinsic truth. A fact that hits him so hard that he thinks for a moment that he’s been struck dead, frozen to the spot and unable to so much as blink:</p><p>He will protect this human.</p><p>No matter what happens, no matter what they do, he will take care of them. He doesn’t know their name or who they are—he can barely register their features beyond the recognition of the humanoid shape that echoes into the feral titans he’d been one of for more months than he could count. Human. He just knows they’re a human, and weak. They’d never last a day without someone to take care of them, shield them from the hungry maws of hordes swarming within the walls, nothing to say of the hundreds outside of it.</p><p>Protect.</p><p><em>Protect</em>.</p><p>He holds them in an open palm, and the human stares back with such fear in their eyes that he’s not sure what to do with them. Will they scream? That would draw attention, and Eren hadn’t given thought to how many other titans had managed to climb over the walls. If seen, they’d no doubt come straight for the human, and he would have to keep them safe at any cost to himself. Would he be strong enough to ward all of them off?</p><p>A faint sputtering caught his attention, eyes drawing back to the tiny form all but shaking in his hands-</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <em>A baby bird, fluttering with one wing; the other is injured. It peeps and peeps, no doubt terrified of Eren and the two faceless forms standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him. Within his tiny hands, the baby bird fits snugly into his cupped palms.</em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>“You have to be gentle,” says one voice, the sound distant and muffled. “If you squeeze too hard, you’ll hurt it more.”</em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>“I won’t hurt it!” that voice is his own, tone so soft and young. “We can bandage its wing and take care of it until it can fly again!”</em>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>Fly… again…</p><p>The moment is suddenly gone, but in place of the baby bird is the human, though they are just as small and fragile within his hands.</p><p>Their lips are moving, and noise is coming out of them in a pattern that is vaguely discernable to have meaning. More sounds, and slowly, surely, those sounds begin to grow more and more familiar—words. The human is speaking. Saying things, things that Eren can start to understand as his mind whirls with flashes of memories that are disconnected from one another, tattered as if they’d been ripped from reality and forced back into his skull.</p><p>“…can’t stay here another day,” they say, voice so soft and broken against the sound of pouring rain and rumbling thunder. So weak. “If you can understand me, a-and you were willing to save me, th-then take me out of here with you.”</p><p>And Eren <em>does</em> understand. He <em>understands</em>! He understands the words, their meaning, he understands that the human is speaking to him and asking him questions—and for some reason, some unfathomable reason that he barely has the mind to comprehend, it makes him happy.</p><p>The human says something rough and quick after a moment, then kicks one of their feet against the curve of Eren’s thumb—its useless, feeling like little more than a faint poke. But when they start to slip over the rain-slicked surface of his skin, the titan instinctively brings up his other hand to keep the human from falling over, just barely holding their torso between thumb and forefinger.</p><p>Once he’s sure they’re stable, he nods.</p><p>The human gasps and goes utterly still in Eren’s palm. Frightened by his response? … No, surprised, they are <em>surprised</em> by it instead. It’s not as if the other titans could understand words, let alone respond to them in any meaningful way, though the human probably guessed that Eren is different when his first reaction isn’t simply to shove them into his mouth.</p><p>When… was the last time he had seen a human?</p><p>Eren doesn’t know the answer. For a long time, he never even realized that it was a question he’d want to ask of himself. He never thought that not seeing one, looking into their eyes, hearing them speak to him, was something he was missing from his empty existence. But now, it’s as if there’s a warm shape stuffed inside of his chest, filling the cold ache that he had assumed had always been part of himself—just like the fear he’d been born into the world with.</p><p>“D-do that again,” the human says. Eren tilts his head after a moment, wondering if the human didn’t realize that he had responded to their words. He nods again and watches their gaze widen so much that the starlight glitters in the colors of their eyes.</p><p>And Eren feels his heartbeat go still.</p><p>Much of what happens directly after is something of a warm blur. Not the same kind that rendered much of his living memory into faded days of non-awareness, but from an almost feverish need to do just as the human had asked of him—free them from the walls. With one hand, he settled them onto his shoulder, urging them against his neck in the fear that they might fall off of him in the climb. Small hands grasping tight to a few locks of his wet hair that he is only vaguely aware of is enough to assure him that they’re still there, still alive, still with him.</p><p>The rain stops by the time he’s made it to the top of the wall, with just a few clouds still covering the night sky. Above them, in the spots where they are thin and broken, Eren can see the stars. He feels the human shift on his shoulder, getting to their wobbly feet, staring up at the sky and expansive horizon below it.</p><p>And it’s then that Eren realizes that he had never really looked at the sky before. He had glanced above his head for the barest notions of if he might be rained on or not, but never once had he actually <em>considered</em> the stars as more than points of light. Not until earlier that day, when he had stared up into rolling clouds and remembered memories that felt like his own, but he didn’t understand them.</p><p>He still doesn’t quite understand them.</p><p>The titan reaches a slow hand up towards his shoulder, fingertips just barely pressing to the side of the human’s hips to steady them, though that is only half the reason that he does. In truth, Eren was certain that he’d reach up to find out that the human had never been real at all, and he was finally fading into the madness that would lead him down the path to being a mindless titan like all the others.</p><p>But he feels them. Small and fragile, but alive. He’s not sure how long the creature had survived within the walls of this abandoned plot of humanity, but the answer doesn’t much matter. He’d keep them safe now, keep them with him, someone to listen to, someone who could acknowledge him, someone who made his immortal days feel as if they had some sort of meaning.</p><p>Eren will protect them for as long as he lives.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you want to read more of my stuff, check out my Attack on Titan writing blog on Tumblr @ <a href="https://attackontitanwritings.tumblr.com/">attackontitanwritings</a>.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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